Robert Couturier

Robert Couturier

Robert Couturier, right, reworked the 1743 Connecticut country house he shares with Jeffrey Morgan, left.

Robert Couturier is no stranger to new situations. In fact, he seems almost to delight in them. Twenty years ago he left Paris, where he was born and raised, to work in New York as an interior designer. “I come from a family who sold everything and traveled with only a satchel on their backs,” he says. And while Couturier himself is still a confirmed globe-trotter, in between trips to Mexico, Miami, Los Angeles, Aspen and Europe to tend to his far-flung clientele, he comes to rest in northeastern Connecticut. That is where his companion, Jeffrey Morgan, a specialist in the area’s vintage houses and how to restore them, has lived for the past fifteen years in a charming clapboard cottage dating to 1743. “Can you imagine, 1743?” the designer asks. “It’s a long time for America.”

Couturier took a spare aesthetic and discreetly cushioned its severity. “It was fun to do this house,” he says. “I had to use a whole language for it and totally new proportions. I didn’t know I liked early American furniture until I came here, but it’s meant for these rooms with low ceilings.” The property consists of the original house, which once belonged to a blacksmith, and a barn, a shed and a guesthouse that Couturier designed three years ago.

Morgan developed an expertise in early American furniture and building styles while working for an antiques dealer in his last years of high school and after college. When he found the house, it was, by his account, “a pink monstrosity.” He restored the beams with a fresh coat of white, the eighteenth-century way—with lime, water and a little salt. He uncovered the original fireplace, with its immense stone lintel, having spotted its outline beneath cement and plaster. He installed wide floorboards brought from a beautiful house in Norwalk that, he says, “should never have been torn down.

As renovations to the main house got under way, Morgan told Couturier that he could do whatever he wished, except to the main living area downstairs, which also serves as the dining room. “Jeffrey told me not to touch it. But of course I touched it! Little by little I brought in a sixteenth-century English sideboard, a settee covered with a tapestry and a pair of seventeenth-century French chairs. I added a heavy Queen Anne wall hanging in front of one door to stop the drafts.”

Temperature is clearly a topic of conversation for Morgan and Couturier. “Before the advent of central heating in this part of the world, people would wake up with snow on their beds!” says the designer. “Or at least frost on their mustaches,” adds Morgan.

The steps leading to the loftlike living space upstairs are so narrow and steep that one must place one’s feet sideways to climb them. Beneath the sloping roof beams, Couturier introduced the first piece of upholstered furniture the walls had ever seen: a sofa, accompanied by 1860s Irish chairs with barley-twist uprights designed to accommodate the voluminous dresses of the era. At the other end he constructed discreet closets, with “typical Connecticut-style panels that are raised on one side and flat on the other.” Morgan added bronze twig pulls that he found in a shop on Martha’s Vineyard for the handles. The chimney, a massive pile of large whitewashed stones, dominates the space.

Downstairs, in the house’s northwest corner, is what Couturier calls “the Sunday-afternoon-loll-with-the-newspapers-room.” Once the pantry, it is an intimate space, with a sofa covered in what looks like burlap but is in fact the softest silk, a pair of Directoire chairs, watercolor miniatures of Morgan’s ancestors and a photograph of the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. There is room for one to recline and another to sit, for imperial spoils and pilgrim purity.

Throughout the house, there is ample evidence of Couturier’s hallmarks: simple yet dashing materials, well-chosen accessories and invisible stitching. He says it’s hard to invent if you are not familiar with your own past. “I say I have no rules, but I do have some. I like balance. I like mixtures, things from different places but of equal quality so that no single thing attracts more attention than another. The universe I’m creating is rigorous: It is décor stripped of décor.”

A flagstone path leads from the main house to the property’s other structures through densely planted flower beds laid out by landscape designer Suzanne DeVos Cole of Swamp Fox Gardens. The guesthouse was inspired by a circa 1782 one-room schoolhouse in Warren, Connecticut, designed by Couturier and built by John Mankin. Its domed ceiling, done with an armature, a wire lath and six coats of plaster, underscores the feeling of spaciousness and light. Like the main house, the space reflects Couturier’s talent for bringing history into an expansive, tolerant present. Stopping before an early-eighteenth-century Boston chest, Couturier declares, “It’s American decorative arts at its best.” The coverlet on the bed was crocheted by Morgan’s grandfather.

The barn, where Morgan has his workshop and Couturier has his drafting table, is where the anachronistic technology is kept—the telephone, computer, television and sound system. It all goes with the gleaming purple VW Beetle Couturier drives to and from Manhattan. His thoughts have already turned to the house he and Morgan will rebuild on an adjacent piece of land, where they plan to spend the summer months, immersed in a forest of oak and hemlock, overlooking a lake.

“I say I have no rules, but I do have some. I like balance. I like mixtures, things from different places but of equal quality.”

“It dates to 1730. The farmers had no use for it—it was going to be demolished.” Eventually Couturier and Morgan intend to use the structure as their main house and transform their current residence into a guesthouse.

“Living here has changed my life,” Robert Couturier observes. “For some people it may be a little trying. It’s not for the faint of heart, let me tell you! Jeffrey comes from a family that has lived in one place for three hundred years. Mine left Europe before the Second World War and went to live in Argentina, Jamaica, Canada and the United States. I call him at the end of a typical day in New York and say, ‘I’ve seen twenty-two clients and gone to sixteen appointments,’ and he says, ‘I had a lovely day. I took a long walk in the woods.’ He’s happier in a simpler universe.” Simpler, perhaps, but couture-made.